Managing change in a complex environment? TOGAF® enables your business to get the best from its People, IT and Technology infrastructure, taking you from where you are NOW to where you need to be. EA Dynamics UK supports a holistic approach to Enterprise Architecture.

Blog Entries

IT Jobs Statistics reveal that within the uk in the last 6 months up August 2013, the IT Jobs market employers cited TOGAF and Enterprise Architecture as their top 2 most desirable skills in their job specifications.

The demand for Eneterprise Architecture and TOGAF were a dominant feature in the IT job specifications showing employers rated these skill highly in their employees.

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/enterprise%20architect.do (Enterprise Architect Top Related IT Skills by Category section)

Why not ensure that your cv reflects market demand by booking one of our TOGAF courses? Our weekend and midweek training enable you to obtain TOGAF accreditation, enabling you to develop the skills you need to progress your career development.

If you want to learn more about communicating enterprise architecture more effectively, why not learn more about enterprise architecture modelling? Learn how to articulate and manage organisational change and business transformations.

You will have the opportunity to learn which views and viewpoints are suitable means of engaging with various types of organisational stakeholders. The range of modelling techniques begin at the strategic layer - SWOT analysis, balanced scorecard, modelling goals, drivers objectives, formulating KP'IS and benefit maps. The model can help manage portfolios and you will be able to model the organisation from various perspectives:- products and services, capabilities and architecture landscape.

Learn how to develop reusable packages and assets - have the opportunity to create and manage variants, links and instances, structuring the assets and partitioning the architecture landscape to best effect.

Dont just think about it - try out the course and have some hands on practice giving you the start you need to articulate the business needs and Architectural Solutions including options analysis examples.

Our ArchiMate and Enterprise Architecture Modelling courses are available midweek and weekend.

An organisation’s perception of how IT contributes to the organisations bottom line varies widely. Some organisations see IT as an overhead and the strategy is to minimise IT costs, whereas other organisations see IT as leverage to increasing their competitiveness and keeping ahead of competition. The word innovation is overused , but it is still a useful catch-all for the various approaches that organisation employs to gain competitive advantage in the market place, both from use of technology, or by utilising a novel approach.

Look within your organisation and identify the main initiatives and use of IT to gauge the overall perception of the IT contribution to the organisation’s revenue stream. Try and work out whether your organisation is ‘Type1’ – seeing IT as an overhead or ‘Type2’ seeing IT and technology as an enabler. You may find that your organisation is a ‘Type 3’ - a blend of both, exploiting technology for increased revenue, but continually striving to optimise costs benefit of IT by reuse and strong oversight and governance.

Enterprise Architecture, including TOGAF, incorporates analysis of strategy and strives to align business and IT, harnessing technology to support organisational goals and objectives.

Modelling approaches, such as ArchiMate and other Enterprise Modelling help model the organisation top down, starting from the SWOT anlysis, balanced scorecards. Identifying capabilities that support the high level drivers. These high level analysis cascades down from the high level initiatives through to individual projects and transitional architectures, giving traceability from the business strategy through to implementation. The overall model aids communication and colalboration between stakeholder groups and also within the overall organisational business and operational hierarchy.

This new article explains how the ATAM method (Architectural Trade-off Method) can be used to evaluate architectural options, both from a technical and business perspective. The following link explains in more.

It can be argued that nobody can always accurately predict the future, especially with all the permutations and combinations that life throws at us. But we can get a more accurate insight into our enterprise architecture landscape by using modelling techniques to help obtain visibility of the landscape.

Help gain an understanding of when application end of life and the technologies it relies on could cause issues without some proactive action being taken before it becomes an issue.

Accurately track applications lifecycles and ensure they align with the business plans -ensuring mission critical applications are finely tuned and ensure silent running of your services.

Why not enquire about our modelling courses to gain a better insight? Learn how to apply architecture tradeoff analysis techniques and run scenarios to assess possible solutions.

Why not read our new article related to Enterprise Architectural thinking and ArchiMate?

Connecting the Architectural world to the Operational World

We can all agree that ArchiMate is a mechanism to model the architecture of an organisation. In this we mean we model the “types” of things in the organisation rather than actual instances of things. Our world is one of standard patterns and designs which can be implemented again and again. For instance, if we use construction as our example, we might hold a pattern library of standard design constructs. A door will be 37 inches wide and 6 feet and 8 inches high with 3 hinges at 10 inches from either end and one in the centre with a handle and catch placed 42 inches from the top. We can use this standard pattern in all our designs. We can have a standard pattern for a bathroom stating it must have a bath, shower, sink and lavatory, a door (to our standard pattern stated elsewhere), and any principles that govern this room such as electrical safety or min and max distances and any requirements we might place on the components. We can then build designs using these patterns. Our bathroom will have these components of these make and model, placed in these positions, connected in this way etc. We are not modelling instances of the bathroom traditionally.

How good is your knowledge of the different types and purpose of the Archimate Diagrams? This multiple choice quiz tests your knowledge of the Archimate diagram purpose. If you are studying for the Archimate certification then it is just extra practice to test what you have learnt.

A new article focused on managing the EA landscape and focusing on business value, risk, managing costs and innovation across the EA landscape can be found on the following link.

Has your business effective insight into the enterprise landscape? Do you have sufficient insight into the number and types of applications, and understand their purpose and contribution to business margin? Is there visibility and transparency of where each application is used, what data it accesses and the technologies the applications usage?

Build and embrace a dashboard and reporting system which will help you monitor and measure key metrics

This is the typical question that is often asked by delegates who are thinking of attending the course.

The honest answer is that the time required to study does vary widely per delegate. This is because it depends on your ability to absorb new information and also the amount of NEW information required varies based on previous experience.

Many delegates have previous experience relating to business analysis, design and planning disciplines and also find that some experience of other frameworks such as COBIT, PRINCE and ITIL actually help and support understanding of the TOGAF framework.

By attending a course we go through all the content that is required to answer the exam questions and also include hands on practice. This means by the end of the course you have an awareness of any knowledge gaps and how much more work is required prior to sitting the exam.

Being part of a class, given real life examples of the course content helps provide clarity and understanding of the concepts. Many delegates have previously tried to read the TOGAF materials themselves but found it heavy going through the book. The course helps to bring the content to life and help you to focus away from everyday pressures and work, so that you have time to absorb the materials and take the exam with more confidence.

Having the debate from the course also gives the opportunity to look at tailoring and real life scenarios of how parts of TOGAF can be pragmatically applied within an organisation. It is not a case of use everything that you read in TOGAF and during the course lively debate will give examples to give more context to its application. Please feel free to call if you have any queries regarding studying and the TOGAF training.

Open Group Certification logo is a trademark and TOGAF is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. TOGAF® 9 Practitioner Certification Training Level 1 and 2 is an Accredited TOGAF 9 Training Course and complies with the accreditation requirements for The Open Group TOGAF Certification for People program